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If the existence of Matter be denied, the necessity of this
Principle must be demonstrated from the treatises "On Matter"
where the question is copiously treated.
To deny Evil a place among realities is necessarily to do away
with the Good as well, and even to deny the existence of anything
desirable; it is to deny desire, avoidance and all intellectual
act; for desire has Good for its object, aversion looks to Evil;
all intellectual act, all Wisdom, deals with Good and Bad, and is
itself one of the things that are good.
There must then be The Good- good unmixed- and the Mingled Good
and Bad, and the Rather Bad than Good, this last ending with the
Utterly Bad we have been seeking, just as that in which Evil
constitutes the lesser part tends, by that lessening, towards the
Good.
What, then, must Evil be to the Soul?
What Soul could contain Evil unless by contact with the lower
Kind? There could be no desire, no sorrow, no rage, no fear: fear
touches the compounded dreading its dissolution; pain and sorrow
are the accompaniments of the dissolution; desires spring from
something troubling the grouped being or are a provision against
trouble threatened; all impression is the stroke of something
unreasonable outside the Soul, accepted only because the Soul is
not devoid of parts or phases; the Soul takes up false notions
through having gone outside of its own truth by ceasing to be
purely itself.
One desire or appetite there is which does not fall under this
condemnation; it is the aspiration towards the
Intellectual-Principle: this demands only that the Soul dwell
alone enshrined within that place of its choice, never lapsing
towards the lower.
Evil is not alone: by virtue of the nature of Good, the power of
Good, it is not Evil only: it appears, necessarily, bound around
with bonds of Beauty, like some captive bound in fetters of gold;
and beneath these it is hidden so that, while it must exist, it
may not be seen by the gods, and that men need not always have
evil before their eyes, but that when it comes before them they
may still be not destitute of Images of the Good and Beautiful
for their Remembrance.
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